Does government funding hold science back?

Jerry Stratton, October 28, 2015

Mad scientists who work in an abandoned shed after school definitely need not apply.

I can’t be sure, because I don’t normally keep track of crackpot theories (not since high school, anyway), but I seem to recall that the idea that adult stem cells, which are abundant, could be used in place of embryonic stem cells was crackpot science back in the late nineties. I do remember that we were told that adult stem cells had practically no use. But when government funding for embryonic stem cells stopped, we suddenly learned that adult stem cells did have uses, and they were easier to get.

I am not saying that we don’t need embryonic stem cell research at all; only that the massive amount of government funding certainly seemed to hold stem cell research back.

In 1960 Bernice Eddy, a government researcher, discovered that when she injected hamsters with the kidney mixture on which the vaccine was cultured, they developed tumors. Eddy’s superiors tried to keep the discovery quiet, but Eddy presented her data at a cancer conference in New York. She was eventually demoted, and lost her laboratory. The cancer-causing virus was soon isolated by other scientists and dubbed SV40, because it was the fortieth simian virus discovered. Alarm spread through the scientific community as researchers realized that nearly every dose of the vaccine had been contaminated. In 1961 federal health officials ordered vaccine manufacturers to screen for the virus and eliminate it from the vaccine. Worried about creating a panic, they kept the discovery of SV40 under wraps and never recalled existing stocks. For two more years millions of additional people were needlessly exposed—bringing the total to 98 million Americans from 1955 to 1963. But after a flurry of quick studies, health officials decided that the virus, thankfully, did not cause cancer in human beings.

After that the story of SV40 ceased to be anything more than a medical curiosity. Even though the virus became a widely used cancer-research tool, because it caused a variety of tumors so easily in laboratory animals, for the better part of four decades there was virtually no research on what SV40 might do to people.

It would have been very embarrassing to find out that the government had been forcing dangerous vaccinations, and so the government wasn’t about to fund such research, and researchers weren’t about to risk losing funding by asking to have such research funded.

This is something Eisenhower warned against in his famous “military-industrial complex” farewell address. He didn’t just warn against the military-industrial complex. He warned against all sorts of cronyism, of government using its massive power to direct what had been the province of the private sector in America.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. — President Dwight D. Eisenhower (President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address)

Now you might respond that lack of funding doesn’t stop fringe scientists from researching fringe ideas, but I don’t think that’s true. That’s a binary analysis: fringe and not fringe, crazy and not crazy. But in nature, including human nature, most things come in gradations. You don’t have 100% crazy and 100% not crazy. You have 100% crazy, 90% crazy, and so on.

The thing is, when the government is throwing around tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars, you would have to be 100% crazy to forego that money. This means that government funding will divide research into completely crazy and completely what has worked in the past. And where “what has worked in the past” is not “what has given us interesting results” but rather “what has netted us a grant”. Avenues that tend to make government look bad—such as researching SV40—aren’t even considered. Avenues that seem crazy will also not be funded. And it’s not just that the government won’t fund them but that scientists will perfectly reasonably self-censor themselves into avenues that will be funded. If your grant proposal fails, that money goes to someone else. You often don’t get a chance to try again until the next funding cycle.

…the goals of obtaining a grant and making a breakthrough discovery are increasingly at odds, warn Bruce Alberts, former president of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor-in-chief of Science; Marc W. Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School; Shirley Tilghman, former president of Princeton University; and Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and former director of the National Cancer Institute, in a highly publicized critique of U.S. biomedical research that was published in April 2014. Real breakthroughs entail unconventional thinking and require work that may repeatedly fail to meet expectations. These days, however, winning grants seems to require staying within the bounds of the known, the authors write. Today’s “hyper competition” for funding, they assert, encourages “conservative, short-term thinking in applicants, reviewers, and funders. The system now favors those who can guarantee results rather than those with potentially path-breaking ideas.”

But the result of this is that instead of a thousand researches in a thousand different directions, we end up with two directions: completely crazy, and completely conventional, with very little in between for unconventional but not completely crazy.

The result is likely to be a severe retardation of scientific progress in those areas where government funding abounds.

“There’s apparently an $800,000 annual salary and an organization full of Shukla family members that has produced next to no results for the millions received. Even NSF on their own web page acknowledges that only one paper has been produced out of a 4.2 million dollar grant.” (Memeorandum thread)
(Hat tip to John Hinderaker at
Power Line)

“The choice of what to study can determine not only researchers' chances of winning the funding needed to build a scientific career, but also their chances of making a significant scientific contribution.”

“A simian virus known as SV40 has been associated with a number of rare human cancers. This same virus contaminated the polio vaccine administered to 98 million Americans from 1955 to 1963. Federal health officials see little reason for concern. A growing cadre of medical researchers disagree.”

When your real-world evidence contradicts your theory, that isn’t a boon for deniers; that’s a boon for you, because, if you are a scientist, that is how your scientific knowledge advances. Real scientists are embarrassed when they ignore real-world evidence in favor of a mere theory.

The religious upbringing altruism study is a failure because the researchers failed to define their moral terms. You can’t study altruism and judgmentalism unless you come up with a definition of the terms. Their definition appears to have been “willing to give money to social science researchers”.

The needs of religious reporting are completely different from the needs of science reporting. Treating climate change as a religion is killing science reporting. If we’re not careful, it will kill science as well.

Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming critics are more dangerous than oil execs who kill dolphins, and need to be buried deeper than two million year old bones. But this makes CAGW a non-science. Science requires criticism or it isn’t science. Science-oriented media outlets are doing CAGW scientists a disservice by protecting them from competing theories.

Conversion stories aren’t meant to convert skeptics; they’re a bonding tale for the converted, a sign of a religion; science needs theories that make predictions about what happens when they’re right and how to falsify them if they’re wrong. Proof for human-caused global warming is always whatever happened last month or last year, never tomorrow. No application of the scientific method can ever disprove it because hindsight is 20/20.

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